Former Alaska Chief Had Retired To Rockbridge
Lexington has found its new police chief – and it’s the man who was assisting the city in the search to fill the position.
The city of Lexington hired Public Sector Search and Consulting to help find a replacement for Chief Angela Greene, who left the department abruptly in August to take a position with the Virginia Attorney General’s office.
Rockbridge County resident Justin Doll, a senior consultant with the company and retired police chief, became the consultant for Lexington. As he went through the process of helping the city figure out what it wanted in its next police chief, Doll began to feel that he would be a good fit for the role.
“I feel like I have some skin in the game since [my wife and I] live here,” he told The News-Gazette on Monday. “We live in the county, but we think of ourselves as Lexington citizens. I felt compelled to at least make the offer.”
Doll, whose appointment was to have been formally voted on by City Council in a short meeting last night, moved to the county with his wife in 2021 following his retirement from the Anchorage Police Department.
He had joined the department in 1996 and performed various duties as an officer, including as a firearms instructor, an academy instructor, a SWAT team member and a bomb squad technician. In 2015, he became the department’s Administration Division commander and the following year became the Crime Suppression Division commander. He was promoted to chief of the department in 2017 and served in that role until his retirement.
Prior to joining the APD, Doll served for six years as a noncommissioned officer in the United States Marine Corps Reserve.
In the cover letter he submitted to the city when he applied for the position of police chief, Doll noted prior to moving to the area, his wife had consulted her brother who is an alumnus of Virginia Military Institute. Her brother, he said, “strongly recommended the area due to the exceptional quality of the people who live here.”
With that recommendation, Doll said, he and his wife came to visit the area and “were absolutely in love with the Lexington community.” They currently reside in the Collierstown area, and Doll told The News-Gazette that he is “here for the long-haul, as long as Lexington is will- ing to have me.”
In a memo to the Resident Advisory Panel ahead of its meeting in early December, Lexington City Manager Tom Carroll listed several pros to hiring Doll as police chief, among them the fact that he is already an established resident of the area, adding that he was “not worried that Lexington is simply a short-term stint for him.”
In an email to The News-Gazette on Monday, Carroll said that the city is “incredibly fortunate” that Doll already calls the city home, adding that he is “one of the nation’s top police executives.”
“He will do an amazing job leading the LPD in the years ahead,” Carroll said. “The process of hiring Justin was a bit unconventional, but I am so excited about the chance to assist him as he leads the fine women and men at the Lexington Police Department.”
Doll told The News-Gazette that his focus as chief is “on making the LPD the best place it could possibly be.
“We’re lucky to have a good police department [here],” he said. “I’m really excited to be a team member here and I’m looking forward to getting to know the city better.”
